


City of Light, Late at Night

by epitomizedTyrant, That_One_Yog_Sothoth



Category: Destiny (Video Games), 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Aged up characters, But only at the start, Death, Does it count as aged up if they start out at the right age?, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Gaurdian Izuku, Gen, Geometry, Gore, Gun Violence, Hijinx, Izuku is bad at feelings, M/M, Midoriya Izuku Has A Gun, Moons Haunted, Multi, Occassionally excessive violence, Several Guns, Suicide, Sword Violence, The Darkness - Freeform, The Light, Time Travel, U.A. is a university, kind of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:15:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26607349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epitomizedTyrant/pseuds/epitomizedTyrant, https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_One_Yog_Sothoth/pseuds/That_One_Yog_Sothoth
Summary: When he is young, Midoriya learns that not all men are created equal.When he's thirteen he forgets that harsh lesson.
Relationships: Hatsume Mei/Midoriya Izuku, Jirou Kyouka/Midoriya Izuku, Jirou Kyouka/Yaoyorozu Momo, Midoriya Izuku & Most of the Cast, Midoriya Izuku & Original Ghost Character
Comments: 43
Kudos: 104





	City of Light, Late at Night

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning, this starts off with Suicide, its rather brief and doesn't stick, but it is occasionally referenced.

Izuku was young when he learned that not all people were created equal. He was taught that lesson again and again, at the hands of teachers and strangers and those who were supposed to be friends. He learned of heroes who protected the world, whose quirks set them apart. 

He adored the shining pillars of society. He wanted to stand among them. He wanted to be like All Might. And then All Might put his hand on the child's shoulder, and told him that he couldn't be a hero. 

In that moment the child recalled the advice of a friend turned cruel, and instead of taking a long hike down the stairs he chose a short walk off the roof.

A universe, a millennia, and a shattered layer of reality away a small machine hummed through the still atmosphere of a once populated moon, following the gunfire and cacophony of violence that echoed in the wake of Praedyth's fireteam, leaving only corpses and echoes and still, still air. The little machine’s name was Sen, and she was following the hint of light that had eluded her for oh so long! She had been among the first of the ghosts created by the traveler, and was now one of only a handful of ghosts left who had never found their destined ward, their risen, their guardian. 

She had spent so long searching, and had thus far failed, but soon she would find her perfect guardian. She would awaken them with the fountain of light she had accumulated, she would provide them with the small arsenal she had amassed, weapons brimming with power and intent... She had obtained many interesting things, oh yes.

The Vault of Glass was a wondrous nightmare, a holy encroachment of darkness into the heart of The Light’s land. Though, according to those like Toland and Osiris, as The Light seemed to fade in the Dark Age of Humanity, so too did the forces of darkness grow similarly weak. Perhaps it was not Sens place to wonder, but she often did. Was Light good? Or was it merely bright?

The Vault called her deeper, ever deeper. She doesn't know when she gets lost, when time stops making sense. When space becomes folded in on itself. But she follows a hint of light, an echo of an echo, and she moves ever forwards towards an end even she is unsure of.

She is taken by surprise at the bright sunshine that is most certainly Earth’s sun filtering through Earth’s atmosphere. But something is very much wrong. She zips through the city, frantic, because it is not her city, it is not The Last City. There is no Traveler, and while she still has access to The Light it is not the same Light. Or perhaps it is, but of a different time and place, or unfiltered, raw. Regardless, this was no Vex simulation, and she could feel it here more than anywhere she had ever been. Her other half. 

She moved with incredible haste, speeding through the bright lively city, to an area much less populated, where she found him. Dead, most certainly, his body mangled and broken at the bottom of a building, blood leaking from flesh ruptured by blunt force trauma, an eye obliterated by his impact, jelly ejected across the pavement like a smashed grape. It saddened her, because she was smart. She could put together the simple puzzle, and after living through the fallout from the Collapse, she could recognize the body of a human who had commited suicide. It further saddened her to see just how young her Guardian was. 

Oh well, now that she was here, if there was one thing he had it was time.

When he was young, Izuku learned that not all people were created equal.

When he was thirteen, Izuku forgot the harsh lesson. As his body was knit back together in the light and recreated completely, as he was resurrected, memory slipped away, and all that remained were a few scattered echoes of the person he once was. A desire to protect the innocent, to stop evil, to learn and apply knowledge. A desire to engage in battle and chase after its music, as a listener if he could not be a performer. A spattering of ideas that no longer held the memories and experiences that had given rise to them, that shaped who he had been and would have the echoes of that effect on who he would become. When he opened his green eyes to the little floating robot, he knew no face, not even his own, but that was fine. He didn't know to miss his face anymore than he knew to miss his name.

“Hello and GOOOOOOOD MORNING! Welcome back to the land of the living! Not that you would know that you were dead a few moments ago buuuuuut.... Whatever. My name is Sen! You have no idea how long I've been looking for you! And no concept of how long that amount of time would even be, you were only what, an adolescent sooooo twenty? Twenty five?”

He watched the spritely machine dance around excitedly. Her shape was an intrepid one, a green spherical shell surrounded her dot matrix blue eye, and affixed to that were symmetrical black pipes that themselves seemed to hold a pair of hard packs. A single fin on the top and bottom extended a few centimeters out from her shell,further enforcing the rugged look.

“Oh, who knows how old you are, it doesn't matter! We are together now and that's all that matters! We are going to be literally inseparable, for, well, as long as we both shall live, so hopefully at least a few hundred years. Your name seems to be Izuku, by the way! According to a notebook you had on you when you died, couldn’t find a surname, or perhaps it is your surname? Hmm... Well, I guess I better give you the whole spiel about what you are now!”

Izuku nodded, taking in as much information as he could during the flood of information that Sen launched into. She started by describing the “The Light” and “risen” and “guardians” and “the last city” and then backtracking to talk about the light more, it was too fundamental not to be thoroughly discussed, though even to her it was mysterious. At some point they had started walking, aimlessly as far as Izuku knew, while Sen talked. He felt like he was starting to get some sort of handle on the whole thing. He didn't know how to channel this light yet, but he could feel it pulsing beneath his flesh and thrumming behind his eyes. Sen assured him that both he and herself, a “ghost”, were veritable fountains of Light, and that he would be able to stand amongst legends like Ana Bray and Saint-14. She didn't quite explain who they actually were, but he thought he got the picture.

As she described something called The Collapse they came across a commotion, a crowd of people gathered around a source of noise and smoke in the alley between two buildings. “Oh? What's this? I'll fly above and check it out!” And then she did. She gasped, “It's some kind of slime monster?! It can't be... but it might be!” She said more to herself than Izuku below. It was a writhing pile of sludge, twisting and undulating while threatening to assimilate the child held in its amorphous body. It lacked many of the signs, but it was too close to a great threat for any sort of careless attitude. She dropped back to her guardian and got close to his face, making him lean back slightly and widen his eyes. “Guardian, if this is some Mutant strain of SIVA we must destroy it with extreme prejudice!”

That sounded... bad. He pushed his way through the crowd, until he laid eyes on the revolting creature. It had some child in its clutches, and the way the shell around his new little friend shifted he could tell she was disgusted by the sight of it. Perhaps afraid, even.

“Here... I had hoped to put it off for a little longer, at least let you get in tune with your light first, but it looks like we have no choice. Hold out your hands.” And he did. She flew close, and with a bright light materialized something in his waiting hands. “This is a powerful weapon called a fusion rifle! Now...” As she spoke her voice dropped, becoming cold, and giving an order that was absolute, so full of intent that the words held weight in the air. “Tear the monster to shreds.”

He could feel some level of instinctual knowledge flow through his bones as he leveled the rifle at the monster, aiming at a part of it that didn't have a frustrating overlap with boy, and depressed the trigger. After a momentary whine the weapon bucked in his hands, and bright Solar bolts turned half the monster into a burnt mess. It screamed, and released the child, and soon enough some buff blond man was dealing with it, the crowd had recoiled away from him but the appearance of the newcomer drew them back in quickly. 

The weapon disappeared from his hands as Sen encrypted it once more, and said “Come, our job is done. That thing looks like a creep, certainly isn’t SIVA, and definitely isn't holding any engrams.” he obliged her, somehow sneaking out before any of the onlookers could stop him. Sen was completely nonplussed by the event, soon returning to telling him about The Light after deciding that no, that thing definitely wasn't SIVA related.

“DEKU!” Someone shouted. Neither Izuku nor Sen stopped. 

“WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, IGNORING ME! FUCK YOU!” Izuku turned to see the blond boy who had been attacked by the slime creature. He glanced around, and seeing no one else on the street, pointed to himself as if to ask, ‘me?’

“I don’t need anyone’s help! Especially not some quirkless loser like you!”

“Uh, who are you?” Izuku asked.

“Oh thank The Traveler you do talk.” Sens frame made it seem like she was slumping in relief.

The stranger seemed confused. And angry. Mostly angry, really. “WHAT, PRETENDING NOT TO KNOW ME LIKE YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME?” His hands started exploding. Izuku didn't really find that weird, but he wasn’t finding most things weird at the moment.

“Ah, no, you see he’s not pretending! He actually is amnesiac, that's what happens after a Ghost bonds with a dead Guardian, they kind of lose all their memories.”

“Yeah, so, I really don't know you! Sorry! Also, could you tell me where we are? We are... kind of lost.”

The blonde seemed to calm down, or at least have some sort of stroke that prevented him from yelling for a few moments, before he shouted “FUCK OFF! SHITTY DEKU!” and stalked away.

“Well, that was...” Sen trailed off.

“Awkward?” Izuku supplied.

“That works. What a rude child.” She floated beside him for a moment. “Well, better keep looking around. Maybe someone who doesn’t suck will know who you are.”

“AHA! YOUNG MIDORIYA, JUST THE YOUNG MAN I WAS LOOKING FOR!” Someone announced from behind them, and they turned to find the buff blond from the slime monster encounter sliding out from an alleyway.

“Who the hell are you?” Izuku asked, and suddenly the buff man deflated in a burst of steam and a vomit of blood before Izuku’s horrified eyes. “ARE YOU OKAY?”

The now skeletal man waved off his concern. “I'm fine my boy, don't concern yourself with my old bones. I saw that stunt you pulled earlier, and I thought you said you were quirkless!?”  
“Huh, that other guy said the same thing!” Sen said.

“And I still don't know what that means. Also, who are you? Do you know me?” Izuku was starting to feel an itch at the back of his brain that he could only describe as annoyance, still heavily colored by concern for the clearly injured man before him. 

“He’s got a little, and by little I mean a complete and permanent, case of Amnesia! According to rumor, if we Ghosts imprint on a living Guardian they can keep some of their memory, buuuuuut Izuku here kind of... jumped off a roof before I got to him.” Izuku glanced at her with a raised eyebrow and a little concern in his eye, but since the only people who seemed to know him were a weird asshole child and this skeletal guy, the story did check out...

“I... I’m All Might...” 

Izuku shrugged.

“W-Well...” The skeletal man trailed off, having lost all steam. And then he bolted.

Izuku sighed in frustration.

Sen hummed beside him. They stood on the warm summer street in silence for a few long moments. Sen floated about, looking off into the distance. “I’m sensing the echoes of a minor chronal anomaly inside the city. It could be a Vex gate we could use to get back to somewhere close to the right earth. Lets go check it out.”

After a little over an hour of walking, Sen told him they were getting close. Izuku was surprised to realize he didn't feel at all tired. He was also momentarily surprised he was surprised about that. Before diving head first into a spiral of introspective surprise he turned his attention to Sen.

“Just in case it is the vex, let’s get you kitted up... lets see... how about this-” She materialized a heavy looking revolver into Izuku's hand, and a magnetic holster around his hip. “The Bad News! Top of the line Hakke hand cannon, hits like ketch crash, annnnd for the bigger baddies, this-!” Izuku quickly holstered the hand cannon as she materialized another weapon into his hands. This time it was an equally weighty shotgun, with a long barrel... was that a suppressor? “The Botheration Mark Twelve! Semi automatic, and less likely to draw attention. According to my readings, the time fluctuation is somewhere underground, so let’s hold off on power weapons.”

“Shouldn't we go and find a place to rest and figure out a plan of some sort before attacking these... Vex? They are the robots right?”

“How would we even do that? We’ve almost no idea where in the world we are, or what world, and if we can just get back to the Last City we won’t have to worry about any of that! The time fluctuation is extremely minor, hopefully a gate so small it has only a minotaur acting as a local mind. Besides, sure the Bad News isn't exactly the First Curse or the Thorn, but it’s a good handcannon! And that shotgun is brand new! You have got this!”

“Yeah, all right. So. How do we get to the vex?”

“Let me scan our environment!” She declared, flying away and occasionally bathing a wall or patch of ground in light from her single eye. Information seemed to flow between them and Izuku could see holographic substructure overlayed into his line of sight. “No vex constructs yet, follow me.”

Izuku followed, thumbing the safety of the Bad News off.

His light churned in him, suffusing him as it had since he had opened his eyes for the first time. He supposed that this body had opened its eyes many times, but devoid of experience it felt wrong to say he was truly still Izuku. It was his name, but he was not the same as the last to bear it.

They finally came to an unassuming door in a back alley. “Alright, there are quite a few lifesigns through here, all of them armed and aggressive. It's a bit far for me to get a good reading, but the structure appears to be partially under renovation. Perhaps these ruffians just moved in?”

“Ruffians?”

“All of them are armed, and most are wearing some sort of disguise. At least the ones on the other side of this door.”

“Is it... okay to just shoot people?” Izuku asked, feeling a little bit unsteady.

Sen shrugged as much as she could without shoulders. “I mean, you can try asking nicely, but these guys don't exactly seem like stand up folks. And they are actually armed with guns, unlike every single civilian we’ve seen. Primitive and simple guns, but still. If you really want to you can go in and ask, not like they can kill you in a way that matters.”

“... All right.” He nodded, turning to the door. He tried the handle, and when it was locked he knocked. “Hello, Exterminators here! We think you might have a Vex infestation!” A moment passed by, empty. In his head Sen indicated that the two guards on the other side had heard him, and seemed to be moving to attack him if he forced entry. “Well, here goes...” He mumbled as he leveled the Bad News at the door handle.

  
  


An hour later Izuku sat at a small table in front of an ice cream shop, idly licking a vanilla cone while a little girl with white hair and a horn made a mess of a sunday.

  
  


Back at the hideout a lanky fellow who went by the name Sir Nighteye picked through a ravaged Yakuza hideout, carefully stepping over the corpses of men in bird masks. At least, the ones that still had heads were wearing masks. Nearly half had their skulls completely obliterated. The battle scenes would imply that the killer was equipped with a ranged quirk, something capable of doing massive individual damage. He’d almost suspect firearms, if not for the incredibly traumatic wounds. If his analysis was correct [and it almost always was] he was dealing with a well trained, well funded individual. An assassin with resources at their back and an organization that would stand to gain from the deaths of their competitors. He was looking at the start of a war or he'd eat his own tie.

He turned to look toward the police’s lead investigator, a longtime acquaintance and professional familiar from his time as All Might’s sidekick. Tsukauchi Naomasa was a rather plain to look at man, with a functional quirk and an amicable if rather mundane personality. His smiles weren’t particularly bright, and he wasn’t generally one for joking on the job, but he did his work well and had contributed in integral ways to Nighteye’s investigations on more than one occasion. He was also madly in love with Toshinori, although Nighteye figured that the great blonde oaf had not at all noticed the fact. For all that he was a wonderful symbol of peace, and a truly great hero, the man had no regard for his own happiness. Despite the combative way that their working relationship had ended Nighteye had half a mind to just tell one of them that the feelings were returned. Whether out of genuine desire to help the dorks or simply for the sake of shaking the birdcage, even Nighteye couldn’t say. 

The detective noticed Nighteye’s attention and took it as an invitation to approach, either not noticing or not heeding the slight narrowing of the hero’s eyes. 

“Quite the incident, huh? Months of recon and leads all down the drain. I can’t even feel too bad for the victims considering who they are and what we’ve learned about them, but it does leave me feeling anxious to know who could have done it.” As he acknowledged the nature of the victims Naomasa took a pointed look in the direction of a particular corpse, whose arms had turned to black spikes and whose body was riddled with dozens of holes partially closed, presumably by his quirk. The goriest of the wounds was reserved for the skull, where ragged skin and bone had tried to rush to the half of Overhaul’s skull that had been sprayed across the wall behind him in some bizarre quirk rigor mortis.

Nighteye took a deep breath to stuff down his personal thoughts on the dark haired, plain faced detective. He shared his hypothesis on the events, noting the detective’s quirked brow as he drew to a close.

“This seems at once too little and too much to be a territory dispute. We’ve got a whole family dead here and no real signs of our missing third party. I’d consider maybe an attempt at a coup, but we’ve no way to identify the few quirks we’re not already familiar with, and no witnesses to question. I’ll buy the assassin angle, but the rest of that theory of yours is a hard sell.”

Nighteye “hmph”ed and turned to walk away. The detective had a good point, but was missing the bigger picture by discounting the violence of what had taken place. “You will see detective, very soon we’ll be wading through the bodies of similar criminals. War has begun.”

After finishing their respective ice creams Izuku, Sen, and Eri considered what they would do next.

“Well, seeing as there were no Vex within that sector, I can’t imagine what the chronal anomalies were. It seems prudent for us to find some kind of discreet lodgings.”

The little machine began humming to herself, compiling comparing and then discarding possible ideas for where the three would stay while they figured out their places in the mysterious world they found themselves in. Izuku turned to the little horned girl who clutched at his hand like a lifeline and who pressed in close to his thigh at the sight of passersby.

“Eri-” Her name had been one of the first things Sen had asked the little girl. “Do you have a place you can return to?” They had no way of knowing if she had a home before this, near mute as she was. Sen thought it was possible that they had found her on the street and taken advantage of her vulnerability. The thought of a child so young totally disconnected from all of humanity resonated deeply within him, a mirror to his own situation, although he was a little older than her. He wondered if the person he had been before was adrift like she was too. If he could help her find her place, he would do everything in his power to do so. 

It was however an unfortunately unfounded hope, as she shook her little head and teared up again for the nth time in as long as he’s known her. He sighed slightly, trying to put on some sort of comforting demeanor for the child. He knelt and awkwardly pat her head. “Well, you have Sen and I now. We won’t let anything bad happen to you.” A part of him **needed** to reassure the small child, to assure her that he was there for her, to make that act of community and promised defense a tangible reality for the child. The evening sun was at his back as he knelt, and in that moment the child looked up to see a guardian angel, powerful, protective and armed with all the wrath of the light.

“Alright!” Sen shouted from the pair’s side, bringing Izuku back to his feet and Eri’s hand back to it’s now permanent place sheltered in Izuku’s. “Records indicate the presence of a once popular, now abandoned, stretch of public land that will serve as a perfect place to put the tiny horned human away during the night!”

Izuku furrowed his brow, “Is that a good idea? She is very young, it seems like a beachfront would lack things she might need. Like shelter. Or food.”

“Ah! Don’t worry about shelter at least. Forgive me, my excitement distracted me! You see what was once an expanse of aesthetically appealing but otherwise mostly useless land has been transformed into what is essentially an industrial landfill!” Izuku pursed his lips, something about bringing a child to an industrial landfill didn’t seem like a good idea, though at the moment the concept of tetanus was absent from his mind. Sen continued hurriedly defending her choice. “That sounds bad, but I propose that such a location will provide shelter, or at least the material resources to build shelter, and will hide us away from prying eyes! We need someplace safe and open so you can test your new abilities when you get them, and no hostel is likely to allow that. You and I may be veritable fountains of Light, incapable of being destroyed by almost anything this world has to throw at us, but you still need to figure out how to channel your Light, and this world is strange to us. We don’t even know what class of Guardian you actually are yet!” The little machine laughs in her nervous off kilter tone and Izuku considers her words. “Or if you even exist within the structures that governed the powers the Guardians of the Last City brought to bear... BUT! I digress again! What I mean to say is that while there are many downsides, it's our only option that actually fulfills those criteria!”

He turns to the little girl walking beside him, who seems to have somewhat understood the discussion up to the point of Izuku’s burgeoning power, and asks, “Does that all sound okay to you? We’re together for now. You have a say in this. I can put off training for a little bit, if you would prefer... a hostel? A different option.” Her little eyes go wide at the idea of having input and she holds intense eye contact with Izuku for a few moments before speaking in a quiet, shaky tone.

“I don’t know what a lot of that means, but anything would be better than Eri’s room again.”

  
  


Bakugo Katsuki was having a shitty fucking day. It started the way all days do, with his alarm clock screeching at him to get up on time to get to school. He was a lot of things, but tardy had never been one of them, after all. School was a waste of fucking time, surrounded by the dregs of society with shitty useless quirks all of them. And the worst of them all was that useless nothing nobody: Deku. He’d been muttering and writing in one of those pointless fucking notebooks of his about some hero bullshit he’d been caught up in before school. 

Then the teacher pointed out just before the day was out that the fucking waste of breath was gonna try and ruin Katsuki’s origin story by applying to UA. How many times would he need to be taught the same exact lesson?! Well, Katsuki would be there to teach him as many times as was required. With a few bangs and some choice words he left the quirkless failure crying his eyes out in the classroom and led a few of the extras to the arcade. He’d said some real cruel shit, he would admit. Even regretted a couple things. But it wasn’t like shitty Deku would ever listen. That was one of his biggest problems, he **never** fucking listened.

The shitty extras were being their usual shitty selves and he lashed out for the stupid shit they were spewing about smoking and trying to sneak into the back room and steal girlie mags. They could fucking ruin their own lives all they wanted, they’d never amount to anything anyway, but if they wanted to do some criminal shit they wouldn’t do it anywhere near him. He’d snap them in half before they risked his perfect record goddamnit. He kicked a fucking bottle he nearly tripped over in his anger and ground his jaw. He’d never apologize to the shitty Deku, but he’d get his old hag to check in on his mom soon, she deserved a better life than she had - having to deal with useless fucking Deku all day every day, it was no wonder she’d fallen apart.

The extras were squealing like fucking pigs about some shit and only managed to distract him long enough for him to get caught up in some nasty slime shit. But like hell he’d be taken hostage by some living shit! He let off explosion after explosion, but as seconds stretched out into minutes and his arms, hands, and lungs began to ache a real fear entered his heart. His story couldn’t fucking ends like this! Swallowed up by a puddle of living shit! Fuck that! Fuck everything if he died like this! It was **His** story goddamnit! Just as he was about to blow his fucking arm off going way beyond the safe limits of his quirk searing light lanced out from the crowd, popping and burning the villains slimy flesh into ash and stinking methane. The villain screamed and writhed and he fell out the bottom of the pile and took a heaving breath. 

He was hacking up his lungs when he looked up to see All Might himself stood before him, fist pulled back ready to win this fight the way he won all his fights. But behind him he saw something that filled him with rage indescribable.

He didn’t hear shit as the heroes pulled him over to be checked out by paramedics. He didn’t register when the fucking d-lister heroes offered him praise and congratulat ions for his quirk. He already knew it was incredible, and fuck them if they think he’d ever play second fiddle to them. He booked it after that fucking head of green hair as soon as he could and caught up to him not very long after. He’d screamed his rage out, all over the fucking nothing’s back, because he wouldn’t even look at him!

Then he did, he turned around and looked at Katsuki and the blonde took notice of the state he was in. The fucking idiot probably didn’t even realize, but he was covered in dried blood, his clothes were matted in the stuff, and his eyes. It was like there was nothing in them at the sight of him. Like everything he’d ever been had been scooped out and left on the side of the road. That’s what the little floating whatever was saying. He’d died, killed himself, and didn’t remember anything about before. It wasn’t true, but he understood in spite of himself that it certainly wasn’t a lie. Deku didn’t listen to him, he **Never** listened! Certainly not about that. Katsuki didn’t run away, he didn’t feel guilty, he didn’t throw up as soon as he turned the corner. And no one saw him to say he was lying.

  
  
  


Sitting cross legged beneath the moon on a sandy beach was a classical to the point of stereotypical way to meditate, and once Eri had been tucked away underneath an awning made from a few dozen rusted poles and a tarpaulin filled with holes, and been surrounded by bedding made from newspapers and Izuku’s ruined coat and shirt, he found himself sitting near her shelter, looking out across the unlit sea. The moon was hidden behind a veil of clouds moments after he sat down, but even that was calming. 

It was at Sens' request that he was looking inwards, seeking the guidance of the scions and heroes of his “Class”, as she had described the process. Seeking the light, in its kind, protective communal strength that Sen had described. He shut his eyes tight, and for the first time truly reached out to that hum of energy in the core of what he was, not the core of his body, or his mind, but the core of the very loose sense of selfhood he had pieced together since his resurrection.

The lapping waves eroded that rock of selfhood away like sandstone, taking layers with each mournful retreat and exuberant advance. He fell, deep and hard into the space between spaces, into a place with no up and no down, only himself and all of birth and life and death. He watched a star explode into being, its light washing over him like a tidal wave, undeniable, warm and powerful, containing all the heat of a god stepping forth to burn away the lie of emptiness. Life, continuing unabated crackling across his skin, but not touching him so deeply, not touching him in a way that mattered. 

The star died. It exploded in a magnificent blast of apocalyptic energy, light and fury suffusing the void between worlds, filling it utterly and completely, before drawing back in on itself, exploding inwards in rebirth and once more washing over him in a tide of light and intent unwavering. It was a song sung for the universe, a holy aria playing at being a funerary dirge. It was truth incarnate and an utter lie. 

Izuku was transfixed, but not utterly. Slowly his consciousness returned as he watched the lights repeat their pattern, and as he did, he felt something icy and cold crawling on his back, whispers licking at his earlobes and crawling into his skull. He turned away from the Light, for a moment, and stared into the Darkness.

It stared back.

His eyes flew open as he was ejected from the meditation, even then in the physical world he could feel it roiling inside of him, demanding his attention, his cognition, it begged understanding even as the darkness curled through him, wrapping around his arms and eyes, piercing his irises in the cloudy night.

Izuku reached one hand out to the Light, and even as he clutched at it his other grasped for the Darkness, its antithesis but not its anathema, of his command or its own accord he could not tell, not here, not in this place where the mind was stretched and intent and will were at the surface, no longer hindered by form and thought. The Darkness in his palm writhed and squirmed, and slipped from his hand and his body and his mind, leaving him feeling exposed, burning in the unmitigated eye of the light. 

He was out of breath, kneeling in the surf. Sen was hovering above him, in her single eye a question best left unanswered, for this night at least. The light had not brought with it any sense of communal strength, nor kindness, merely life and rebirth. Pure, and primal.

The day came with little ceremony, his body needed neither sleep nor food, so he had simply wandered the beach in silence after his... attempt to commune with The Light. He managed to find a few things, one of which was an actual mattress that wasn't a deathtrap or filled with bugs. Sure, it had some stains on it that he didn't want to think about, and smelled a little bit like a corpse and a lot like urine, but hopefully a session of being dunked in the ocean, scrubbed, and then left out to dry would make it semi suitable for the child to sleep on.

“I wonder what the nutritional needs of a child are?” Sen questioned the open air sometime near morning, looking at Eri’s peaceful sleeping face.

“Don’t you have access to... uh.”

“The internet, they call it. And yes! I do! I suppose that would be the best thing to do, one moment...” She floats thoughtfully for a moment. “Hmm, with the money we looted from those guys we can probably feed her healthily for about a week, after that we will have problems.”

  
  
  


Midoriya Inko had once been a truly fierce woman. It was how she’d first befriended Mitsuki, and how she’d courted her husband in their younger years. Most people saw her soft eyes and nervous smiles and wrote her off as nothing to be concerned over, but when it came to the things she cared for she would fight tooth and nail, and she would come out victorious. Atop everything that she considered to be important sat her baby boy Izuku. But the world didn’t see her sweet, brilliant, brave son when it looked at him, the world only ever saw his lack of quirk. 

Every day he came back home burned and bruised, and every day he took a moment outside the door to stand up straighter, to put on a smile, and to dry his tears. It tore her apart more with every opportunity he chose not to take to tell her, and she had only herself to blame. She’d been among the first to stab at his heart after all, in a moment of frightened uncertainty she’d apologized to him instead of reassured him, and now she was always a little more scared every day that she wouldn’t see her baby boy ever again. 

When the afternoon came and went without any sort of sign from Izuku that he was out and about chasing after hero fights or staying late in the library to study, her heart grew heavy with anxiety and fear. And when evening fell and the darkness of night blanketed the city and still she had no word she was truly afraid. Mitsuki called her to ask if she was alright, claiming that Katsuki was off somehow, unresponsive and shut in his room. The two mothers shared their fears, and still Izuku did not show. Inko sent text after text and call after call to a number that was now non-responsive. And as she sat silently weeping, terrified beyond any level she’d ever been before, in a dark home all alone waiting for her son to come home, a part of her collapsed under the enormity of her regret, sorrow, and fear.

Morning came slowly, and still Inko sat waiting, weeping tearlessly. She’d called out of work, desperation laced through her tone, and her supervisors had been thankfully understanding. Then she’d called the police. They didn’t want to open a case on a missing kid for less than a solid 24 hours, explaining how often overbearing family would put in calls like that, but they assured the frightened mother that they’d keep their eyes peeled and even if they held off on actually opening the case file until the next cycle. She told them what she could of him, his description, his habits, everything she could to help them find her baby boy. 

“What’s his quirk?” They’d asked in a professional, concerned and sympathetic tone. 

“He’s quirkless.” She’d answered immediately, afraid and honest with the people who were supposed to be impartial. She heard a sigh over the line, followed by murmurs of conversation she couldn’t make out.

“Thank you for your concern ma’am. We’ll call you to let you know if we find anything. Would you like to speak to a counselor?” She said no and after a few empty words the click of an ended call sent shocks through her body. She was left stunned. Was that all they needed? Surely there was more to consider? They wouldn’t ignore him simply because he’d been born different than them all?! Inko collapsed to the floor weeping and raging. She’d once been fierce, but in standing against the world she worried that she may have broken, and that now her son had paid the price for her weakness.

  
  


It’s days before Izuku dares dive once more into the space between, this night unfettered by clouds, the light pollution from the city drowns the stars, leaving only Luna’s wide open eye to gaze at him with challenge. He feels like he’s being watched. He has no plan, only his will and his curiosity.

Simply allowing the light to wash over him had proven futile, and the Darkness was... out of his purview for the time being. So now, as a solar energy exploded forth before him he reached out with a fist full of intent and will he took hold of it, demanding it conform to his desires and the energy flowed to him, easily drawing into his hand, and as he surfaced once more on the beach, he stood and looked to his palms.

Now they were alive, alight with the fire of a newborn star, full of life and heat. He focused it, now the light felt more like a part of him, like something claimed by his will, integrated and inherently extant. New, but familiar. The mighty heat in his body followed his will easily, and after a moment of focus he let it loose on a heap of steel and scrap beside him in a shapeless blast, a flood only barely aimed. Instantaneously the scrap metal was dominated, the solar energy turned it into a mound of molten metal beneath the weight of a massive beam of light and heat, a Solar Flare that exploded forth from his hand. He felt drained from the outburst, but not empty, not by half.

In his fist he called forth the solar energy once more, and tossed it gently into another pile, where it exploded like napalm, alighting the trash and burning for nearly a minute before dying back to a mere chemical reaction that continued slowly ravaging the rubber and paper. 

He watched the embers crackle off his hand as he held it up against the moon, radiant energy still suffusing him. He smiled, emerald eyes bright in the moonlight. He felt powerful. He liked the feeling. 

“Well, congratulations, you don’t fit into any of the archetypical disciplines of the Guardians. Perhaps... Maybe it's because in this universe, you are the first Guardian.”

“That’s fine.” He spoke with serenity manufactured by the ecstasy of destruction. “Maybe it will be more exciting this way.”

And then the morning sun came with all the problems the future brought, for now it was a lack of money, so he told Eri to lay low for the day, and after carving out another little hideout a quarter kilometer down the beach he and Sen set out. 

“So, the best way to get cash is to hunt down more of those Yakuza guys right? Or should we go after one of those quirked gangs?”

In the free time they had between taking care of Eri and communing with the paracausal forces that backlit all energy transference in the galaxy, Sen had spent a great deal of time researching and explaining to Izuku what quirks, pro heros, and numerous other oddities of this world were.

Izuku idly wondered what his quirk had been, or if he had been one of the few born without one.

“Whichever promises the most profit I suppose. I don't imagine we will come across any that will stand before the might of the light.”

“Wow, that sounds just as corny from you as it did that one month where Zavala thought it sounded cool.”

“Who?”

“Dont worry about it.”

Hours later he was poking idly through the ruined building while Sen rifled through pockets. Solar light still burned in him, and the light that shone and pulsed behind his eyes illuminated the crates of weapons and illicit substances as he rifled through them. The handguns were of no use to him, barely even lethal compared to the powerful weapons Sen had collected from her universe. He opened one crate to find dozens of red tubes carefully set away. He pulled one out, examining it and idly toying with the little string coming out the top. Or bottom, he supposed, it was just a nondescript tube, slightly shorter than his forearm. He glanced at the box. A small label stuck out to him.

“TNT Plus?”

“Sounds like an explosive of some sort.” Sen answered from across the room. “TNT is a type of explosive material used in demolition. I don't know what the Plus could mean.”

“Hm... lets take this box.”

Sen nodded, a bodily action for her, and bathed the crate in light locking it away in engram.

“So I just had a thought...” She started to say.

“Dangerous things, those.”

The ghost did her best impression of blowing a raspberry, before turning serious. “Law enforcement. Definitely gonna be a problem sooner or later.”

  
  


“So. A grenade huh?”

“Yeah, all the guardians had them. You are able to use something similar to a napalm grenade, but variety is the spice of life, and adaptability is the most powerful ally a Guardian has. I think that the class cognitions that defined their abilities probably came with a luminous echo of grenades created by other Guardians, so...”

Izuku tossed the stick of dynamite up and caught it deftly in his other hand. “Suffuse this with light so much that it becomes an echo of power I can call upon at a moment's notice?” 

“Well, yes. That exactly.”

“Just...”

“Go for it!”

“Cool... Cool.” He gathered his light, and...

If the next few hours of trial and error made them very glad they had taken the entire box, and familiarized Izuku with the sensation of TNT exploding into his face, no one really needed to know.

The choice to try it out on a different landfill they had snuck into turned out to be a very good one, based on the news stories that Sen discovered the following morning.

At least learning to use the light to jump while mid air was relatively painless, except for one minor crash that temporarily divested Izuku of a limb.

  
  


Sir Nighteye was not the kind of hero most people would describe as smug. This was in large part because he was a rather stoic man when not trying to elicit a laugh, and a smug hero was not one that inspired much hope. He was a self assured man, yes, his quirk required him to be in order to use it effectively. But he was not often smug. Tsukauchi Naomasa was however one of the few people who could identify the slight upward tilt to the green haired hero’s eyebrows as they found evidence of a prediction made without the help of a quirk.

“I won’t waste our time by gloating, or saying I told you so-” Sir Nighteye started.

“You’re literally doing that, but go off I guess.” Tamakawa Sansa, Tsukauchi’s partner and friend interrupts with a catlike smile and narrowed pupils. He and Nighteye have never much liked each other for some reason, and it takes a placating hand on the cat-man’s shoulder to put him back at ease. Nighteye wishes Tsukauchi wouldn’t, a little banter was a good way to assure people that things weren’t too bad, yet.

“Some injuries are consistent with the Eight Precepts massacre, to be sure, but I’m seeing a lot less pin-point accuracy. I’d believe explosives if there were more structural damage, and these scattered scorched areas aren’t consistent with any known heat based quirks that are active within a thousand kilometers. This is a different family, had small ties with The Eight Precepts, but otherwise a relatively neutral group. There’s a stash of weapons and drugs untouched in the back room, so I doubt this was a raid for gear. Lot of missing wallets though, but we might be able to attribute that to the neighborhood, poor area, lots of desperate people.” The detective sighs in weary exasperation at the mysterious death toll, and in spite of his initial thoughts he has to admit that Nighteye may have a point about the war, despite not knowing the identity of the aggressor.

“As you say, detective. No fingerprints, bootprints, hairs, blood, or other identifiable bits of material I presume?” He manages to keep the slight lilt of his voice to a professional interest, as opposed to the self-satisfied purr it would be if he were alone. The horrific scene taints the satisfaction of using pure deductive skills, but he has seen too much death for it to completely ruin anything.

“No, nothing we can use, and a whole lot of bodies. I’ll agree the assassin angle has even more merit now, but I dunno, my gut is telling me this wasn’t a hit made with intention. It sends a message to be sure, but it leaves no clear sender. That’s not how you start a war.” The detective shares a valid point, but Nighteye has been correct thus far, and a single counterpoint does not a theory break. Still, something to consider.

  
  


Toshinori Yagi had many reasons to have a broken heart. Lost friends, lost mentors, memories of a world gone by, a weight upon his back so heavy that he knew, and had always known, it would crush him in the end. He was aware of all the painful truths underlying the society of heroes, but he had been so far caught up in trying to push back the forces of evil that he had no idea how to fix any of it. He felt like a stopgap.

The young man he had met a little more than a month ago hadn’t helped. Why had he fled so immediately upon realizing he had found the wrong person, or having been forgotten? It had not freed him of his debt to the child, he owed him for the hurt he had caused. And he had looked for Midoriya Izuku, and when he found a missing person report his spine had frozen over.

Dagobah municipal beach was a grim reminder of the stopgap nature of the “Symbol of Peace”. He sighed deeply as he picked his way down to the beach, slowly circling amongst the piles of scrap and debris. His eyes nearly bulged out of his skull at the sight of a small, white haired girl with a little horn sticking out of her head sitting on a mattress covered in new sheets underneath a makeshift awning, wrapped in a dull red blanket and watching cartoons on a TV connected to a pair of solar panels on stands.

“Excuse me young lady.” He waved as her little head jerked up with a curious expression. “Are you okay? What are you doing here?”

“...Live here.” She stated flatly.

“Alone?”

“No. Zuzu and Sen take care of me!” She smiled a little. 

The work of a hero, the true work, was never done. He smiled the kindest he could muster with his grimm countenance and asked; “Could I talk to them?”

The little girl nodded and beckoned, turning off her tv.

A short walk down the beach they found them.

The young man they, _he,_ had been looking for was huddled up against a pile of scrap, a most unlikely place for someone he had all but given up on finding. The boy’s eyes were unfocused and one burning with a pale greenish light, something strange and anathemic. The space around him was warped, bent out of shape and shaking in agony, entropy popped and ate at the sand and the trash in equal measure, frost slowly crawling geometrically out as heat was stolen from the system.

Toshinori could feel the inevitable cold even from where he stood, several meters away. It was biting and clawing at the air like something living, something damning.

“He’s been like this for a while...” the small girl said in an adorable lilt, the warmth in her voice for this person rising above the miasmic feeling of chill. “He said he was going to meditate last night, and when I woke up Sen told me he wasn’t feeling well.”

“It's technically true! He is certainly not feeling... well.” Sen, the tiny robot that Toshinori had seen once before spoke with a fragile facade of levity... Toshinori felt something emotional dig into his gut and twist what little of it he had left. ”He’ll be ok. I have complete faith in my guardian! Oh!” She gasped as when took a step forward. “Wait! I wouldn't....” She trailed off as Toshinori approached, the unsettling chill taking an ever tighter hold with each step. Frost gathered on his jeans, and he knelt in front of the young man. Behind him a stray breeze sent Eri’s makeshift blanket fluttering like a flag for an old country with traditions running deep and bloody.

“Hello young man. I do hope that this wasn’t my fault, for that horrible thing that I said to you... I was wrong, and not just because you are smart and full of potential. Even if you don't remember...”

The green iris that was still visible suddenly met his eye, and he assumed that the other, obscured by pale green anti-energy as it was, also found its focus on him. “You are not known to me... or are you? For a moment I think you wore the body of a king, yet here you kneel as a beggar... were you wearing the body of that king I think that Logic would demand I meet you in battle, and triumph... But that is madness... a violence without purpose...” The young man argued with himself in hisses and silences that bore the weight of curses. “Is it growth? Is simple forward momentum enough, without purpose and thought? Is it right to listen? Is it good? All Might... Is the light good or is it merely bright? They whisper to me, truths wrapped in greater truths pretending to be lies... thoughts that double back on themselves... I am like you, like all sapient light, born in the light, but I let it in...” He rambled on, “I heard it whisper and I listened, All Might,” The boy’s breath caught for a halting moment, “ **O Symbol...** ” The half said sentence bit into Toshinori’s brain like a command half spoken, he longed to hear the sentence, but dreaded its completion. It was both a blessing and a curse when the young man continued on with his mad ramble, content to let the anthem song wither and die. “It’s told me things... things I cannot un-know...but so has the light... oh! So has the light! The Traveler has no sway here, not yet, but the worms have been crawling for years and years!”

The young man stood, and the fissure in reality followed him like a billowing cape, and Toshinori recoiled back onto his feet in surprise, ignoring the blood leaking from his mouth for the time being.

“Hero King!” the young man rasped, hand wreathed in that inverted light, falling to his side as if it reached for the hilt of a missing blade, that in a moment found its way to his waiting palm. From nothing he began extracting a sword made from chitin and sorrow, its emergence hissing damnation, its pommel glowing in runes of the same pale green warp-light as his eye. The chitin, as it emerged into the light of day, lost its appearance, shifting and warping, and beneath its surface Toshinori could see fields of stars. “WHY DOES YOUR SLAYING MAKE SO MUCH SENSE? You are powerful! The most powerful human on earth, right?” The voice that echoed from his mouth was so far removed from the young boy asking if he could be a hero without a quirk... without power... is this what power would have done to him? “I should meet you in combat then! That is how the strong are made? BUT ARE YOU THE STRONGEST?” His eyes fell across the little girl, whose eyes were wide, but Toshinori was startled to realize they were not wide with fear. In a whisper the young man continued. “Her light is even more vast than yours, the power to turn back time is... undeniable... So it would dictate that I...” He went almost slack for a moment, and then with a howl he grit his teeth and shoved the blade back into nothingness, and the negative light sucked back into him like a tablecloth into an industrial vacuum. He fell to his knees, eyes wide. He whispered in utter confusion, “The logic is faulty, isnt it?” Toshinori was still, but Eri was not. She skipped up to him with Sen, and threw her arms around him. 

“I’m glad you’re okay zuzu!”

“So... what did you do this time?” Sen said, floating close.

In a small voice, the young man whispered to Sen even as he finally started to return Eri’s hug, careful not to touch her with the hand that held the blade. “I asked why, Sen. And I was answered.” He looked at his free hand, outstretched behind Eri’s back, palm up. Anti-light still shimmering, pale green vapors of warp wafted off of it periodically. “I wanted to know if the Light was good... or merely bright...” His doubtful eyes held no tears as he looked to his tiniest companion. “I think I know, now. And I almost wish I didn’t.”

Sen nuzzled him. “I sense a ‘but’.” She said seriously, after the affectionate contact. 

He smiled at her softly. “But not knowing wouldn't make it not true, little light.”

Sen froze, and her shell squeezed together. “O-Oh-” She said with a shaky voice. “A n-nick n-name. I...” She almost seemed like she was crying.

“Sen?” Izuku said, suddenly worry crept into his voice.

“I WAS JUST SO LONELY FOR SO LONG!” She wailed as she collided into his side, nuzzling there. “I’VE ONLY KNOWN YOU FOR A MONTH BUT I KN-KNEW WE WOULD BE PERFECT! YOU ARE MY GUARDIAN! IM HOME AND THE TOWER IS GONE AND THE TRAVELER IS HALFWAY ACROSS THE UNIVERSE BUT YOU’RE HERE SO IT'S OKAY!” Izuku pat the little machine and held her close.

Toshinori felt more awkward with every passing second. He felt like he was witnessing a family moment, something intimate and honest, and not meant for outside eyes.

Of course, the question of why these two children were living on the trash beach was far more important than his awkwardness. Especially seeing the impact it seemed to be having on the young man’s psyche, what with his quirk going out of control and ‘speaking’ to him.

“I'm sorry to interrupt you young ones, but I must ask.” Toshinori spoke up. “Why are you out here living in a junkyard?”

“Ah, I can explain that, more or less.” The little robot floated over. “To make a long story short, Izuku has no memories and Eri was a prisoner of a yakuza extremist group bent on ridding the world of quirks through torturing and experimenting on a child.” When she saw the look on his face she tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, they are pretty much all dead now!”

“You... killed people?” Toshinori... wasn’t sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, he had saved a child from a fate nigh unimaginable. On the other, with no memories the young man had set out and killed and seemed to show no remorse or doubt about his actions.

“To be fair they shot first. Well. They tried to shoot first. And were also probably evil.” He shrugged.

“Yeah, that too.” Sen continued after Izuku’s meager attempt at placation. “Anyway, then we came here because we didn’t really have anywhere else to go. End of story.”

“I... do you not have parents?”

“I don't even know my family name.”

“Midoriya.” the two looked at him in surprise. “We met briefly, sometime ago. Midoriya Izuku is your name.”

“Hm... Midoriya Izuku...” he mulled it over in his mouth, testing it out. “It’s as good a name as any I suppose.”

“Oh!” Sen spoke up. “There’s a missing persons case under that name! Filed by one Midoriya Inko! That sounds like... your mom maybe?” Izuku shrugged. “Huh... I wonder how she’ll react to... all this...”

“I can't imagine particularly well.” Yagi admitted. “I'll do my best to soften the blow... but she likely believes you to be truly dead, so in that way at least it will be happy news.”

“But... I am not the person she raised.”

“Perhaps not,” Toshinori began to speak his mind, pushing his doubts about the boys actions out of the way and considering their outcomes. “but you still seem to be a good person who seeks to protect others, so perhaps you have not changed all that dramatically.”

Instead of collecting their effects, Eri and Izuku came with only themselves in tow, deciding that just in case this parent was a part of the problem that inspired his prior demise, they should be prepared to return to their erstwhile homes. Toshinori didn’t force the issue, but on some level decided that if she refused to acknowledge Izuku, he would take in the two children.

“Do you want to know what the Darkness asked of me?” Izuku said in a quiet voice as they approached the police department where Tsukauchi worked.

“What did it ask you, my boy?” Toshinori’s voice was steeped in quiet concern.

“It... commanded that I drink deeply of the universe, and grow fat on power.” His words were raw, and full of an alien weight.

“Oh. Uh. What does that mean?”

“I don't know... Not really. Not yet.” Eri looked at him from her perch on Izuku’s arm, hands around his neck.

Midoriya Inko has been for all intents and purposes dead for the better part of a month when she receives a call from the police with word at all about her son. Her workplace has been gracious enough to allow her time off to deal with her situation, and so she has spent her time alternating between idling anxiously beside her phone, weeping aloud at the unfairness the cruelty and the evil of a society that would abandon her son for the circumstances of his birth, and sleeping fitfully, her “rest” plagued with nightmares of a lifetime spent with only the scraps of hope keeping her alive and never a word about her son one way or the other. 

She has never been a religious woman, but she has grown to believe that it is in hell she now resides. And how fitting, she muses, for a woman like her to be damned for all eternity. When the phone rings she is deep in despondency and the message goes to the machine, thankfully not yet full, and it is a simple one.

“Midoriya-san, we found your son. Please let us know as soon as you get this message.” A name and station number follow, but Inko can’t consciously process any of it. They found Izuku? How? Where? The embers of her hope spark and sputter before roaring into an inferno she’s nearly afraid of. They say they found him, not that he’s alright, she needs to be aware of the possibility that she may not be freed from hell, and instead doomed to accepting her place in it forevermore. Even so, resolution is better than her terrible uncertainty and so she calls back, makes ready, and heads out of her home for the first time in just over three weeks.

The sounds of life are torturous to her, children play in the park she and Izuku used to visit together, neighbors call out greetings- pleased to see her out of her slump [if only they knew], and life goes on. She’s filled with loathing at the sight of almost all of it. How dare the world keep turning when her baby boy, the light of this world, had disappeared? How could anything good have ever happened to anyone when Izuku was not around. How could the world have kept turning?

It is with these thoughts and questions that Midoriya Inko arrives at the local police station to receive the news she has been dreading and hoping for in equal measure. She is required to identify herself and then is brought back into the station and to a quiet room, not dissimilar to an interrogation chamber. A pair of men, one who looks like he’s been dead for 5 years and another plain faced with dark hair, sit down across from her after a few minutes’ wait. The dark haired man is the first to speak in a calm, even tone.

“Ma’am, the first thing we need to tell you is that we found your son, alive and healthy.” His tone was grim and dissonant from the news, and even with the spark of hope being fanned in her chest she felt the weight of the oncoming ‘But.’

“Before we talk about your son...” The skeletal man delivered the proverbial bad cop side of the conversation. “We need to discuss what may have caused his disappearance.”

“H-He’s, he’s quirkless. He has always been so strong, but he wanted to be a hero, so so badly. He... there’s this video... I think he was being bullied. A lot. I... Thought-” Inko’s breath caught in her throat. “I thought he had killed himself!” She sobbed. “So-So many quirkless kids do I-”

“Its okay ma’am, thank you.” The plain faced man consoles her. “Now, I need to ask you some difficult questions, and I need you to answer them truthfully. My quirk tells me when someone is lying, so keep that in mind.”

Inko nods, pushing her tears down.

“Have you ever verbally, physically or sexually assaulted or abused your son?”

“No of course not! How-” Inko started to yell, but stopped when he raised a hand. 

“Ma’am, these are things that I have to ask, especially considering the situation. Now...” He led into a series of questions that all dug at Inko, but by some miracle she powered through them, and the man seemed satisfied.

“Now that I am sure that... certain circumstances were out of your control... I have good news, and bad news.” Her heart nearly stopped once more as the man’s face grew grim. “The good news is that your son is not only alive, but has also seemingly manifested a quirk. In addition to this, he has been taking care of an orphaned girl.”

“Oh, my boy...”

“The... The bad news. The emergence of his quirk seemingly... wiped his memory. He is completely amnesic, and is unlikely to ever recover those memories.”

“C-Completely? What does th-that mean?” Inko could feel the tears streaming down her face.

“He doesn’t remember anything apart from language and a few skills, as far as we have been able to tell. He... won't remember you miss Midoriya. I’m sorry.” 

“B-but he’s alive? Thats-” She choked on air, “Oh my boy- I- I need to see him! Please!”

They nodded, and quietly led her through the station, passing by officers and clerks who each gave knowing looks and stepped out of the way.

The holding room was pleasant, with simple furniture and a few magazines.

Inside sits her son, green hair wilder than ever, dressed in clothes that, while clean, had really been put through the wringer. Across from him sits a little girl in jeans and a white coat, kicking her legs on the tall chair and playing chess with him. Neither of them appeared to actually know how to play, much to the chagrin of a small... robot?

“No, that's a horse for one thing, Guardian, and the piece is called a knight. It can only move-” She? She was trying to explain before stopping suddenly to shift her eye up at Inko. “Oh! Hello! You must be Midoriya Inko! What a pleasure to meet you! I’m Sen!”

“She appeared with your sons quirk, miss Midoriya.”

“Oh, is that the story we are going with? Yeah, I can make that work!”

“Sen-” The skeletal man started before the excitable little ball of metal cut him off.

“Hi! I'm Sen! An aspect of your son’s newly awakened quirk!” Behind her little Izuku was watching the exchange with an amused expression, but his eyes were sharp and attentive.

“N-Nice to meet you Sen.” She choked out, tears already starting to flow down her cheeks.

  
  


Inko led them to Izuku’s room. Opening the door and looking in started Inko’s tears once more, and sent a shock down Toshinori’s spine. Izuku took it in passively, eyes trailing over hero merchandise, mostly bearing All Might‘s face.

In Toshinori’s mind, this was all the proof needed to know that his words were responsible for killing a child. A thoughtless remonition from his idol had crushed the boy’s hopes so completely that he had taken the leap. The fact that death had not kept him did nothing to ease the weight on Toshinori’s heart. The eyes, now empty of recognition as he wandered through a place that he should have known to be home, that in a past life he had assembled himself,only challenged Toshinori further. 

“Maybe you were supposed to be a warlock!” Sen’s cheerful voice postulated as she flew over to the notebooks. “You had one of these on you when I found you! It was irrecoverable though.”

“Hero Analysis for the Future...” Izuku pulled one off the shelf at random, and started flipping through it. 

“You wanted to be a hero. Ever since you were little, you used to watch this video of All Might...” Inko trailed off, tears threatening to break from her eyes.

He seemed uneasy in his room. Inko maintained that it was his room, even if the decorations no longer resonated. She wept with him, that first night home, apologies and lamentations falling from her lips in fits and starts as he consoled her, the best that he could while Izuku wiled away the hours combing through his room to learn about the person he once was.

“Alright, so, according to all of your records you are quirkless. Obviously that's not the case.” Izuku rolled his eyes internally, but showed no outward emotion as the doctor led him to a large cubic room made up of thirty foot high gray walls. “Step inside and we will begin an assessment of your quirk.”

He did so, walking to the center of the room and waiting.

“Alright, explain your quirk as you understand it.”

Midoriya had given this a considerable amount of thought, so it wasn’t hard to spin a convincing explanation. “My quirk builds up a certain amount of an energy called the light which I can then sublet into three elements, Solar, Arc,and Void. I can project these in a variety of ways, though I’ve only explored the Solar subset of power. Additionally the light sustains my body, so I do not need to eat, sleep, or drink.”

“Please demonstrate your use of this ‘Solar’ energy.”

Izuku nodded, and struck empty air with a sharp knee, solar energy exploding forth and curling around nothing before retreating back to him. For some reason using the light to empower his melee attacks with elemental damage only released the energy on impact. 

“Alright, thank you. Do you feel pain while using any part of your quirk?”

“No.”

“Have you ever used it to the point where it made you tired?”

“No.”

And so on the questions went in the same vein winding and leading ultimately to little other than a hilariously poor quirk write up.

Barely a week passed at the small apartment before All Might offered to let them live at his villa.

Izuku was glad to move out of the small apartment. Mainly for Eri, she finally got a real room to stay in, a place to call her own that was safe and empty. That sense of ownership would likely be very healthy for her. That was the most important thing. 

On the other hand, the selfish hand... He also got his own room, which he didn’t really care about for its own sake, letting Eri use his old bed had been fine and such. It was just... that apartment had the feeling of history. Those journals he’d read were quietly tragic, the last dying wails of a dream unattainable by his old self. The raw honesty behind the analysis in those journals painted a complicated tableau of bitterness and self loathing, and a stark refusal to acknowledge the fact that he had been victimized by the society he adored.

It was easier here, on the other side of the city of light from his old home.

After months of preparation, physical exercises at the behest of All Might, and a great deal of reparatory schooling, learning things he should have known for years, the time was drawing near. He had retained all his knowledge of his skills, of things that were somewhat concrete. He knew math well enough, beyond the level of highschool even, so perhaps that was merely a side effect of rebirth under Sen’s watchful eye. 

He had lost more than he had retained of course. Far more. History. Quirk lore. Keeping language at the cost of losing every book he’d read, every voice he’d heard to learn it.

What he relearned was enough, in the eyes of the law at least. He stood at the gate of Mon Kalamari Highschool, an upper class place of education paid for by All Might. He stood, Backpack slung off one shoulder, tie arranged impeccably by Sen’s ability to literally materialise it on to him instantaneously and perfectly. 

“This is going to be boring isn't it?” Izuku grumbled to no one in particular.

It was.

It was the most boring thing he’d experienced in his short existence. He’d tried to play on the little phone he’d been given, but a tall student with dark blue hair glared at him hard enough he could feel it. He took notes, he did the work, but it was utterly uninteresting.

Somehow the Physical Education class was worse. The teacher lined his class, 1E, up along the track, and had them jog as many laps as they could.

Izuku’s stamina was bottomless, and while his jogging pace was slower than the taller kids, he kept going until the teacher told him to stop.

The similar test for pushups was a different story with the same ending. His body, infused with light as it was, healed shortly after taking damage, as long as it wasn’t still taking a notable amount of damage. The tears in his muscles healed far too quick to cause him pain, the acid was eliminated from his muscles almost instantly, and his bottomless stamina lent itself well to the activity.

After one hundred and fifty pushups without a drop of sweat the P.E. teacher told him he didn't need to participate in these tests, and that he should just go watch from the sidelines.

It was so boring.

His mathematical skills were more advanced than the skills taught in the classes. Which was fine, he finished the assignments, answered a couple questions, and to reiterate:

He was bored. 

At lunch he didn’t need to eat, and nothing looked particularly appetizing, so instead he sat at an empty table and sort of fell into a state on the edge of meditation.

“Hey, uh, mind if I sit here?” Asked someone, breaking Izuku out of his stupor.

“Sure. Go ahead.” He nodded, looking up at the boy. Bright, spiky red hair sat atop a grinning face. A grin filled with sharp, polished teeth. 

“Thanks! I'm Kirishima, nice to meet you!”

“Izuku. You too. Nice to meet you, that is.”

The sunny red head set his tray down and climbed over the seat and flashed him a smile that was blindingly bright. Apparently unbothered by Izuku’s lack of food, the shark-faced boy tore into his meal.

Izuku wasn’t quite sure what to do about the situation, but soon it was remedied by an odd pair, or in Izuku’s honest supposition a contrasting but sensible pair, of other students approached. One was marked by shocking yellow hair with a black bolt and an unkempt uniform, the other by her earlobe mounted audio jacks and more fashionably unkempt uniform.

“This place fills up pretty fast, huh?” The blonde grinned. “Mind if we join you?”

Izuku gestured vaguely at an empty spot, and Kirishima nodded raucously. 

“So,” the boy who introduced himself as Kaminari Denki started. “What made you guys come to this school?”

Jirou rolled her eyes. “Honestly Kami it’s probably the same reason everyone else did.”

“It’s one of the Hero Prep schools!” Kirishima happily responded regardless. “I’m working part time just to afford it, but it will be worth it!”

“A friend of my moms recommended it. I don’t know why, but he offered to pay my way if I applied myself. So. Here I am.” Izuku shrugged, more or less telling the truth. Toshinori and Inko had become fast friends, after all.

“You aren’t planning on being a hero?” The harsh, put together boy asked as he suddenly appeared, overhearing their conversation as he passed by with a tray. “With your level of physical fitness I’m surprised. Im Iida Tenya by the way.”

“Izuku. The physical fitness is just a side effect of... my quirk I guess.” He shrugged again.

“Oh, we should totally talk about quirks! Mines an electric emitter type! I can emit a ton, but if I let loose too much I temporarily fry my brain.” Jirou rolled her eyes exaggeratedly when Kaminari said “temporarily.”

“My quirk is hardening! It’s not too flashy, but I can harden my body farther than steel! Uh, farther on the Mohs scale I mean.”

Jirou waved her earlobes in front of her, getting a short giggle from Kirishima and Kaminari, a nod from Iida, and a moment of careful scrutiny from Izuku. “My jacks basically let me hear things through surfaces I plug into and I can use internal sounds like my heartbeat and amplify them into objects.” 

“My quirk is called engine!” Iida said after her short demonstration. “I have engines in my legs that allow me to massively boost my running speed.”

Everyone looked at him expectantly, and Izuku tried to recall exactly what they had worked out to describe his quirk. “It’s... complicated.” He said, preparing to pretend that he didn’t manipulate paracausal forces to exert his will on the physical world. “It’s called The Light Sustains, which is kind of non-indicative of its application... I can do more than just run for long periods of time, I mean. It does more than sustain. I guess...”

“The light?” Jirou asked, with one eyebrow raised high in the air. “Like... from the sun? Or all light? Do you do photosynthesis?”

Izuku opened his mouth to speak, closed it, repeated the process, and then finally found the words he needed. “It's more like a metaphorical light? The Light is-”

“He can throw fireballs, and that's all you really need to know.” Sen interrupted, appearing from behind his back. “Hi! I’m Sen, and I’m an aspect of his quirk.”

Izuku just rolled his eyes as everyone else opened theirs wide in shock. “We are separately conscious, but completely inseparable. Well. Not completely but I can summon her back to me at a moment's notice and she can do the same over short distances.”

“That’s awesome, but... how is that all one quirk?” Kaminari asked, mouth open slightly.

“It's... really complicated.” Izuku said lamely.

“And saying it’s a quirk is kinda...” Sen shuffled her shell in an ‘ehhh’ gesture.

“It’s complicated.” Izuku reiterated, a little more firmly this time. “It's all... increasingly complex applications of a single core concept. Which is the manipulation of... really it's best not to think about it too hard. It's one of _those_ quirks.”

School gets better, after a few days. Not perfect, but with a few friends it isn't terrible.

The proposition Iida makes after a couple days is... interesting at least.

“You want me to join a club?” Izuku looks at Iida with a listliss expression.

“Yes. It's still early in the year and it could be crucial to your development. It is important for everyone to connect with their peers and experience new things.”

Izuku sighed. He didn’t really want to join a club, or do anything at school really. It was already so boring... he glanced at the list Iida was trying to hand him. 

“That one.”

“... Archery club?” Iida said after looking at the one he pointed too.

“Yup.”

“I suppose it is an excellent way to improve your hand eye coordination.”

“Sure.”

“The way you say that implies you have other intentions.”

“I favor projectiles, I’m looking forward to it.”

“Hm, well, okay then.”

He sits with Toshinori on the back porch sometimes, listening to the radio and doing his homework while Toshinori does paperwork or struggles with sudoku.

One night, when the moon is out and bright he feels it on his back. He is being watched.

It's not the creeping and crawling eyes on his back he’s felt before on nights of deep meditation and pushing boundaries. He stood quickly, startling Toshinori. He stepped out into the full light of the moon. He snarled up at it, and it sat passively looking back. But it was looking. It called to him, but its voice... its whispers didn't drip with the vile slithering wrath he had felt in reaching out before. The whispers were quiet, and honest.

“Midoriya, what's wrong?” Toshinori asked, leaning forward.

“Moons haunted.” He said plainly.

“What?”

“Moons fucking haunted.” He said a little louder, the Bad News dropped into his palm from engram and he glanced down to check the chamber as Sen appeared next to him and watched the moon.

“What are you doing with that?”

“Nothing. Just... Centering myself.”

“So what do you mean? What's on the moon?”

“Oh. Ah. You see. I... don't know? Darkness? Probably?”

“That's disturbing.”

“Eh. It's not- active. I think.” Izuku shrugged. “It’s different than what you saw me, uh, dealing with before. It will probably stay there. Almost certainly. Definitely won't have to deal with it within like...”

“Seven to eight years?” Sen postured.

“Seven to eight years. Definitely. Have at least that much time.” 

“Why are you speaking in that cadence?”

“What do you mean?”

“I- Nothing. I'll take your word for it.”

They were quiet for several long moments, and the whispers retreated though the weight of eyes remained.

Toshinori shifted, unsure of himself. The burden of the future was not something that he felt should weigh heavily on the minds of the young. Yet the burden came no matter what, and delivering it gently might lighten the load, if only a little, rather than letting it fall heavy and without control at some point unknown.

So Toshinori broached the question.

“Izuku my boy, do you... not want to be a hero? I want to encourage it, of course, but I don't want you to feel forced into it, by my ideals or... well, history.”

Izuku mulled it over, thinking long and quietly. “The world of Pro Heroism... I don’t really care about the pageantry or what people think about me. All I care about is protecting the innocent from actions of those who would hurt others for whatever reason. The heroic industry will allow me to do that without stepping on too many toes, and seems like, if nothing else, an entertaining engagement. So, I think I will dedicate myself to this path, at least for now.”

  
  
  


“My boy... Izuku. Would you talk with me for a moment?”

Izuku follows Toshinori into his office and sits down across the desk from him. The chair that Toshinori keeps for guests is absurdly comfortable, and is one of the few true excesses that the number 1 has treated himself to.

“You are one of the very few people to know that I am All Might, and that I have different forms at all. You also possess a truly heroic drive to help others and a capable mind for tactics.”

“Thank you?” Izuku half bowed.

“I am merely telling the truth. I... Would like to tell you a greater truth. And give you an offer.”

The truth of One for All has less effect on Izuku and Sen than he had expected, by their nature as anomalies of the world; another such anomaly is not all that striking. Toshinori wonders what could shock them, and suspects he doesn’t want to know. 

“I appreciate your faith in me, but... I cannot be your inheritor. What it comes down to is the fact that my quirk is not a quirk. I believe that the risk of losing either a significant portion of my own power, or the complete destruction of the quirk you wish to pass on would be the outcome.”

Toshinori nodded, about to answer before Izuku cut him off.

“Moreover... I must consider the darkness that is... is a part of me now. I do not know how it would react to such given strength. Regardless, should you ever need my help in the training of your eventual protege, it would be an honor.”

  
  
  


Izuku found that he was actually pretty good at archery. It was different than firing a gun like a handcannon was different from an autorifle, but he was learning, and he was enjoying it. It was a pleasant activity to look forward to at the end of the day.

  
  


Izuku had almost drifted into the strange pseudo sleep he sometimes managed in the night when Sen emerged in a tiny cascade of light.

“Hey, so, I was scanning through the radio stations and I found something interesting.” Sens eye flickers for a moment, then a voice that wasn’t hers played through Izuku’s ears.

The voice is low, rich, and feminine, tinged with a light sultry drawl from an accent he couldn't place. He can make out radio static behind her words, quiet as it was.

“Hey dreamers. Ever heard the tale of Ozymandias? A fellow met with a traveler from an antique land, a place of shifting sand and history that stretched back farther than even the books remembered. He told him of an unusual statue, a pair of stone legs sticking out of the ground, shattered above the ankles. The traveler paused a moment, sipping from a tincture of citrus and rose. He recounted that, not so far from the monumental feet lay what was surely once the visage of the statue, now buried halfway in sand, only a single glaring eye and half a sneer left to define his face, all other features long eroded by the desert wind. This traveler had once, in a fit of curiosity wandered up to the base of the statue and brushed away the sand, and upon it this traveler found the words: “My name is Ozymandias! King of Kings! Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.” and then the traveler chuckled. The fellow asked of this king and his kingdom, and the traveler told him: ‘I’ve walked these sands a hundred times in my travels, and nothin aside from that pedestal remains of ol’ Ozymandias and his kingdom.’ The fellow found himself ruefully glad, but dare not voice it. He too, sat in an empire, and were he to consider its ephemeral nature, perhaps it too would fall away, leaving nothing but sand and a final monument to its own hubris.” She paused for a moment. “Be careful out there. It's Time for Nora to say... Good night, and sweet dreams.”

“Interesting...” Izuku said, genuinely.

“No, no. Listen a little closer, a little more willingly. Think about community, and the light while you listen.” Sen chastised and played it again as he complied.

“Hey Dreamers. The City has been quieter since those Eight Precepts types died out, and I know y’all have been thankful for the peace and quiet. But there's a new bunch in town tryin to take up the mantle of violent extremism wearing a cloak of organized crime. A real nasty bunch callin themselves the Retribution been slinkin about, takin after that Hero Killer who’s been prowling around the southern cities past couple months. They claim to be out hunting only the impure heroes, but it seems they only talk the talk, and don't care all that much about walkin the walk. I know you vigilante types don't care much for the Pros, but I know y’all don't much care for arbitrary murderers either. These folk ain’t so easily trifled with, you hear me Dreamers? They’ve been hangin’ about the old industrial strip, so be careful out there. Its time for Nora to say... Good night, and sweet dreams.” 

The voice abruptly cut off. “What the fuck.”

“Almost certainly a quirk. A strange one too.” Sen trailed off.

Sen looked at him blankly, shell giving no indication of particular opinion. Izuku met her eye thoughtfully, before slowly standing up. The Botheration materialized into his hands, and he ran his eyes over its angles admiringly. “She seems nice.”

“Yes, quite the community activist, from what I’ve been reading. A few blogs on certain corners talk about her...”

“Maybe I can do some light reading later.”

“Indeed, I’ll make sure to give you some recommendations.”

“On an unrelated note, I’ve always wanted to tour an industrial zone.”

  
  


\--Server created at 6:12 AM--

Rocksteady added Auxcord, LowWattage, Gun, Iida Tenya

Rocksteady: GUYS

Rocksteady: THE UA SPORTS FESTIVAL STARTS TODAY

LowWattage: Bruh it’s 6 am

Gun: Sports festival?

Iida Tenya: The sports festival is a week long festival where the aspiring pro heroes at U.A. University compete in a number of ways and run booths to promote themselves!

Iida Tenya: It is always quite the spectacle!

LowWattage: why is Midoriya’s name gun?

Gun: weapon of choice

Gun: Its a meme!

Gun: get your own account

AuxCord: Ah, Izuku and Sen

Gun: Hello!

Gun: how are you even doing that

Iida Tenya: Wait, if you two are together then why are you not just talking to eachother?

Rocksteady: GUys, I think we have much more important things to worry about! 

Rocksteady: LIKE THE SPORTS FESTIVAL

Auxcord: You are really into that huh

Rocksteady: OF COURSE!

Rocksteady: Its a huge part of our careers! Aren’t you guys interested? 

LowWattage: Well duh, but also

LowWattage: 6am

Gun: whats special about six AM?

Gun: I believe its very early for people who sleep!

Gun: i see.

  
  
  
  


\--Server created at 6:42 PM--

Rocksteady added Auxcord, LowWattage, Gun

RockSteady: hey have you guys seen Iida for the past couple days?

Auxcord: no, I think he was staying home because of what happened to his brother during the sports festival.

LowWattage: fuckin hero killer

RockSteady: yeah

RockSteady: but he hasn’t talked to you guys or anything?

Auxcord: is everything okay?

Rocksteady: I dunno, I just looked at my Friends! map and hes apparently in Hosu right now

Auxcord: Iida damn it 

Gun: Well

Gun: I suppose I should go have a talk with him.

Rocksteady: What do you mean?

Rocksteady: Midoriya?

Auxcord: He turned on his location in the app, looks like he is on a train to Hosu 

Gun: I’m going to go talk to Iida

Auxcord: be careful,

LowWattage: He wouldnt go after the Hero Killer right?

LowWattage: not just by himself?

Auxcord: he probably isn’t thinking straight, he was really close to his brother

Gun: I’m somewhat hurt that he did not tell us about this.

Gun: if one decides to go on a revenge quest, one should at least bring a friend.

Gun: Preferably two! A proper Fireteam should be formed whenever one seeks to hunt a monster!

Auxcord: your problem with this is that he went alone? not that he is trying to fight a villain for revenge?

Gun: His family was attacked. The reaction is understandable.

Rocksteady: I guess?

Auxcord: well, if he did go the chances of him actually finding the killer are astronomically low

Auxcord: Good luck talking to him

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing fast and loose with Destiny Lore here, but anyway. 
> 
> Imma be honest with yall, this is gonna be one of those fics that updates on a very drawn out schedule, and by schedule I mean completely random times. Who knows. It will be a while though. 
> 
> I do have reasons to play fast and loose. Those reasons are because I want to.
> 
> I have a little quiet discord that has a certain energy to it. https://discord.gg/dPQy4HJ
> 
> God is in her heaven, and all is right with the world.


End file.
